During the month of April, I’ll be participating in the 2017 Blogging from A to Z Challenge. For this year’s theme, I chose to look at leadership qualities as I’ve just recently (within the past 6 months) become the director of my public library. We have about 50 staff members, most of whom are part-time employees serving a 30,000 resident community by providing high-quality programs and resources. Each day, I’ll look at one trait and how it’s helped me to become a better director.

I’ve mentioned a few times in this blog series about our strategic planning process. This was something I came into the job wanting to work on. We haven’t had any form of a strategic plan in quite a while and I felt that creating a plan and executing it over the course of 3-5 years would not only be beneficial to our community, but would also help the staff to plan programs and purchase resources with some guidance.

We are literally starting at the ground level by creating a new vision and mission statement. On previous mission statement was a paragraph long and only mentioned books, didn’t say a word about programming and was entirely too long for anyone to remember.

My goal at the end of this year is to have a written document that states our vision and mission statement, our core values as an organization, some goals for the future and objectives to allow us to succeed. Forward-thinking is a vital aspect of leadership and one that makes me excited to come to work each day. Can I be any more nerdy than being excited to work on a strategic plan for a library?!?!?! Probably not, but I wouldn’t want it any other way 🙂